The wild man sat in his lawn chair and tried to ignore the small boy lurking behind the shabby travel trailer. The chair was made from aluminum tubing and woven plastic webbing. The coarse webbing sometimes pinched the back of the wild man’s thighs, but he was accustomed to this. He’d owned the chair for a very long time. The sneaking little brat, however, was a new and unwelcome annoyance.
Continue reading “Frankie and the Wild Man by Marco Etheridge”
Watching the planes take off and land. It’s possible to observe them through a gap between trees. Little glimpses, a flash of light, a roar of the engine. Gone again, come again. I’ve watched so many, it puts me to sleep. It takes a while to realise those sausage tubes contain real people. Pilots and stewardesses in their perfectly tailored suits. When I turn away, the sound of traffic returns, the commotion on the street. Windows don’t close, except in monsoon season. Even then… Snakes slip between unguarded spaces. The monkeys set up a racket. The creatures lurking in the forest make their presence known. There are no trophy hunters; no men emulating Hemingway. The fish have buried themselves in the deepest deep, the wild game have found a habitat across the border more in keeping with their lifestyle. The forest will flourish until the loggers return. And then there will be mayhem.
Continue reading “Bobby’s Shadow by Desmond Kelly”
Tin men play their kazoos too loud. Like having an annoying ass bee trying to drill into the deep part of your ear. It’s Sunday and it’s the boardwalk. Sea spray that you’re not supposed to touch or it’ll leave a nasty pollution rash. Gregg doesn’t care, though. His arm is messed up anyhow from all the lousy skateboarding.
Gregg rides and I walk and the waves shove against the wooden thing beneath our feet. Some people call it an embankment, but that sounds too much like a place where loose-tie fathers coax children into cashing checks in exchange for thin lollipops. Gregg grazes his lousy arm against the slippery arm rail, catches some sea spray in his mouth.
Continue reading “Arm Milk by Spencer Levy”
Henry Searles, once an unknown character in this business, did not imagine what the insides of Ted Gentry’s house looked like because he had no idea where to begin his search for furniture, trinkets, odds and ends, lackluster fragments of Gentry’s past, lost articles in a blindly-kept closet holding piled up clues. It all appeared pointless and highly impractical, just a guy he met on the corner where the river slips under the bridge, had a drink with him at a bar, like they were old friends suddenly rejoined rather than new acquaintances, but Gentry, sort of mystically, left a note with the barkeep to deliver to Searles if anything ever happened to him, as though Doom itself had made the call.
Continue reading “The Lone Inheritance by Tom Sheehan”
“Kausalya Supraja Rama Purva Sandhya Pravarthathe …” – the mobile phone whirred to life, blaring the famous verses of Guru Vishwamitra, scaring the wits out of the guileless night. Murthy shifted in his bed, extending an arm out to silence the phone. It was 4:30 am, a.m. brahma muhurtham, the time deemed ideal for meditation and yoga by the Hindu scriptures. In all of his sixty plus years, he had, without fail, adhered to the strict regimen of starting his day at the brahma muhurtham. However, the last few months were only making him increasingly aware of his growing age. What was once a disciplined routine, now required all his resolve to keep its tag.
Continue reading “Daddy by Naga Vydyanathan”
Whistler stood in the weeds, leaning against the brick wall of the old train station and listening to the susurration of wind over the tracks. The others might have known he was there, might have seen him suddenly after looking once and not seeing him as the wind stirred through the cyclone fence, wafting the trumpet vines and grasses down near the old, rusting boxcar where Nathan lived, but he saw no one. Bobo and Saint Louis lived at the other end of the yard in a faded red caboose, but nobody knew where Whistler lived. He appeared and disappeared. No one knew.
Continue reading “The Violin by Frank Jamison”
It was really a love story in the end.
The noise outside was consistent. Traffic, construction, and wandering conversations as New Yorkers enjoyed the relative peace of Memorial Day Weekend in the city. But for Steve, the owner of the New Amity Restaurant, it was the end.
Continue reading “It was really a love story in the end by Adam Kluger”
I pour and they drink, and I am always mesmerized by their desires, their needs, their dry heaves between drunks so calamitous they’ll never know the impact till they get to the great beyond. I’m a bartender, barman, pourer, scoop setter, sudsman, but I will say at the same time that this menial job, though one with a great overview of the human soul, has saved my own soul for the long ride into the hereafter, though my travels don’t go beyond the 25 feet of the bar.
Continue reading “From the Other Side of the Saloon Bar by Tom Sheehan”
The world was so much simpler when Forever 21 was just a shitty clothing store. Nowadays, it’s nothing more than a bar off 42nd street, with a comically-large hourglass by the door filled with sand that never falls. I used to consider it nothing more than a cheap gimmick; another one of the city’s countless tourist traps. The truth is the bar was never what attracted people. All those stupid, far-from-subtle decorations aren’t what people come to stare at; we are.
Continue reading “A Little Time by Dylan Martin”
Yumi Suzuki decided she’d throw herself in front of a train on a warm, sunny day. She came to this conclusion sitting in her apartment, watching the weather forecast for the next week. It rained for the last five days, and if the forecast was correct – she’d see the sun tomorrow.
Continue reading “Abyss by Emil Birchman”
literally stories 